On August 10, 2026, Chinese media Sohu Finance published an article exaggerating that China's new heavy ion accelerator "HIAF" had caught up in just half a month to an area that Japan's RIKEN had taken decades to reach.

The article introduced that HIAF, which had just passed its acceptance inspection on July 21, successfully identified Hafnium-153 on August 5, just 15 days later. It claimed that HIAF caught up in just half a month of "trial operation" to what RIKEN had finally discovered after operating its equipment for nearly 20 years.

It further appealed that while it is common knowledge that similar devices generally require an adjustment period of half a year to one year to obtain their first physical results after activation, HIAF succeeded in passing a beam through the entire 2-kilometer underground beamline in just 16 hours, significantly breaking the world record.

It also explained that this astonishing speed is supported by overwhelming performance specifications, stating that the core indicator "beam intensity" (the amount of microscopic projectiles that can be irradiated per unit time) is extremely high. It claimed that the oxygen ion beam intensity is 3 times the conventional world record, and the bismuth ion beam intensity is 7.5 times the same.

Furthermore, it likened the search for rare atomic nuclei to "searching for gold dust in the Yellow River" and pointed out HIAF's high productivity, claiming that it can complete in just over 3 hours what other countries' devices take a full day to do. It also conveyed that with future performance improvements, detection capabilities are expected to significantly increase even further.

The article also introduced that HIAF adopts the world's first architecture that fundamentally changed the basic design itself, rather than merely following existing technology. It claimed that it is a combined structure integrating a superconducting linear accelerator, a synchrotron, and a storage ring, and that China has completely independently developed and controlled the core platform technology.

It should be noted that this article is not a presentation of facts, but rather has a strong tendency to exaggerate China's technological superiority using research achievements.

First, the confrontational expression "caught up to Japan in just half a month" is an exaggeration unique to Chinese media, and the Chinese Academy of Sciences stated in its official announcement that the results of RIKEN are in a relationship of "mutual verification," mutually confirming each other's discoveries.

Furthermore, caution is also needed regarding the expression "China caught up in 15 days to an achievement Japan spent 20 years on." RIKEN's "20 years" refers to the entire history of the facility that has discovered over 200 new nuclides, and it was not searching for Hafnium-153 for 20 years. The article also does not mention that the construction and technological development of HIAF itself took approximately 7 years from its groundbreaking in 2018.

In addition, data comparisons, such as those between "16 hours" and "half a year to one year," are forced citations that compare different concepts side-by-side, and an intention to unnecessarily incite a confrontational structure with Japan can be observed.

The only objective fact conveyed by the article is that Japan and China, using their respective methods, discovered the new nuclide Hafnium-153 at almost the same time and mutually confirmed its accuracy. (Edited and Translated by Kawajiri)